Here's what you need to do:

1. Purchase a cheap local OTO/phenol red test kit (yellow/red drops)
2. Start dosing with bleach, at the rate of 8 gallons of PLAIN household bleach each evening (~15 - 20 ppm on your pool)
3. Skip doses if test with OTO shows dark ORANGE color; dose if dark yellow / light orange result.
4. Read the muriatic acid page, linked in my signature, and use hardware store 31% muriatic acid to lower your pH to 7.2 - 7.6.
5. If you want to use borax -- and it will help some -- you need to alternate dosing 20# of borax (or 4 boxes) with acid. You'll need a total of 30 boxes of borax, and about 8 gallons of muriatic acid (PLUS what you need to get pH down first) to fully treat your pool.
6. After the first bleach dose, BRUSH your pool completely. Brush every other day after, but ONLY on days when you add bleach.
7. Order a Taylor K2006 testkit (link in my signature) so you can find out what's actually in your water.
8. Do not by any more stabilized chlorine -- no trichlor, dichlor, 4-in-1, etc. Use ONLY bleach, for now.
9. You can leave your SWCG running, but you can NOT count on it to get you where you need to be. Use bleach!

10. If you are going to be gone for a week, try very hard to get to the ORANGE range (not dark orange) and BRUSH before you go.